Needing Help Recovering Formatted External BitLocker Partition

[cthulhuiscool]

Had a bit of a headache inducing goof last night. One of my desktop's has seen better day, and some of its usb ports seem to fail at random. I had two drives plugged in, a new one and one with a bunch of data on it (both bitlocker encrypted). The computer gave a weird error where it seemed to swap the the device letters and gave me a warning that what I thought was the new/empty drive could not be recognized so I just quickformatted it and encrypted with bitlocker (using the lower tier "used space only" method).
I've recovered from deleted bitlocker partitions before with the repair-bde console command, but for some reason this time it doesnt seem to work. I'm wondering if the slight about of encryption overlaid scrambled something, and if so is there any way to recover my files? I have the keys the drive was decrypted from the "new" encryption keys right away and now is just standing in "raw" format. I'm being careful not to monkey with it too much until I have a better idea. Any advice would be much appreciated, thanks.

 

[daglesj]

At this point I guess it's important to mention - only use encryption if you really really need to! And if you do, up the backups by 1 more.

Usually more trouble than its worth.

 

[cthulhuiscool]

At this point I guess it's important to mention - only use encryption if you really really need to! And if you do, up the backups by 1 more.

Usually more trouble than its worth.

Wise words, and important lesson. I tried a bunch of different recovery software trials and nothing worked, at this point writing it off as a loss. Thankfully anything truly important was backed up in a number of places so I mostly only lost abandoned video editing projects I would "get to one day". I'll spin this as the data gods simultaneously clearing slack from my perceived backlog while teaching me the importance of never doing anything irreversible like formatting and encryption without having first manually verified everything.

 

[daglesj]

Yeah you are not the first and certainly not the last.

I remember about 10 years ago I was dabbling and encrypted my laptop, "oh this is cool!" I thought. But I forgot that I did a lot of tinkering and stuff with that laptop and encryption don't like sudden reboots, messed up boot loaders and lockups etc. That was painful. Lucky I had a decryption disk but it took a day to get back to the data (HDD). So yeah certainly don't put encryption on a hotrod, critical workhorse or 'tweaked' machine.

As usual YMMV but....hmmm